Knowing God Like Job Did

9/15/1996

The last song, I think, is sufficient provocation to go ahead and talk a little bit about the trip to Africa from a spiritual standpoint. That phrase in the last song is really especially meaningful to those of us that went. “Give Him all your tears of sadness. Give Him all your years of pain, and you’ll enter into life in Jesus’ name.”

There are two ways you can look at the tears of sadness and the years of pain. One way to look at it would be, “Hey, our lot in life, like Ecclesiastes says over and over again, is just to have pain and meaningless things. The rain falls on the just and the unjust, and pain and misery fall on the just and the unjust.” You can look at it from a really superficial standpoint that everybody suffers, everybody has pain, everybody has tears, everybody has difficulties, everybody has heartaches, and that would be true. That’s a little more superficial than we’re going to ponder it here in a minute.

Jesus’ hardships, Jesus’ pains, Jesus’ tears weren’t of that superficial nature, I think you’d agree. That the things that He encountered were supernatural issues of warfare. Not just, “Oh life is just not going the way I want it to. These bad things happen to me and I don’t know what to do about it, but I’ll turn to God and He’ll make everything okay.” Yeah, He will, and yes we do have all those difficulties and challenges, just as a course of being in the human body, in the tent of the body, as Paul called it, and in a fallen world where we work by the sweat of the brow and we’re kept safe through childbearing. There certainly are curses just by plain ol’ being here. There’s difficulties of many kinds. In every relationship there are strains and struggles. In fact, we’ve talked about it before, unless you have those you really don’t have a relationship. If it’s not tested by the fire, it’s not a very good relationship anyway.

“Give Him all your tears of sadness, all your years of pain, and you’ll enter into life in Jesus’ name.” Good. Everybody that’s part of the human race has suffering, has pain, and you do need to make the right choices when those times come. You do need to turn your face towards God, this is true.

Something we encountered in this trip to Africa (Malawi) that I think took all of that for all of us to a level that was beyond the most extreme of our imagination—the tears of sadness and the years of pain. We encountered many years of pain in a few days. There is just no question about it. I think what we all discovered is that a lot of the things that happen in life, particularly when you are about the Father’s business, are supernatural difficulties that are way beyond the scope of just inhabiting planet Earth.

You remember the things that happened in Job were not typical things. Satan himself stood before the throne of God and said, “This guy over here. You’ve been blessing him; you’ve been protecting him. No wonder he serves you. No wonder he loves you. Everything is going okay for him.” God said, “Okay, I’ll let you test that. I’ll let you see if you can prove otherwise. That he’s not serving me from the heart. That it’s just because of these externals.” And satan pummeled him with many kinds of disasters—his children dying, his possessions being taken away, his health being taken away. Then he’s tormented by his wife, “Curse God and die.” And then he’s tormented by his friends, “Must be your sin, Job. It’s got to be your sin. Everybody knows that bad things don’t happen to good people, so if you just repent of your arrogance and all of your sin, then God would bless you.” Job’s trying to process all of this and saying, “I don’t think I’ve sinned. I feel certain that that’s not the problem here. This is not about that. I’m not going to curse God. I’m not going to argue with God about it all, but this isn’t because of my sin, and this isn’t just the natural course of events that all these bad things could happen in one day. This must be God doing these terrible things to me, but I don’t understand that because it’s not because of sin.”

So he is tortured about the whole thing and his friends are being your typical charismatic sort of, “Ask God for a Cadillac and don’t doubt, and He will give it to you because God wants all His children to prosper.” That same way of thinking that is very prevalent today were coming from Job’s three so-called friends.

The real battle, though, when you get right down to it, it’s obvious in retrospect when you read the book, it was a supernatural battle of God wanting to reveal Himself to Job in a way that surpassed anything that he had ever previously known, and Job admitted that towards the end of the book. He said, “My ears have heard of you, but now I repent in sackcloth and ashes because now my eyes of my heart have seen you.”

So something was transacted there on a supernatural level that involved satan himself, God’s will for Job to come to a new level of understanding and relationship with Him. He was shallow. He wasn’t filled with sin, but he was shallow compared to what God had in mind for him. So there was a warfare that was happening that was a deep, savage, difficult warfare that was surrounding him and driving him to the point of death. Not just the physical death because of the boils and the illness, but something inside of him was so deeply tortured that it was just beyond words. They sat for seven days before they even started to talk about it, in total silence. That’s how deep that anguish and pain were.

If you have any thoughts that Job’s three friends didn’t care about him, they stopped everything they were doing, left their jobs and their families, and sat there in total silence for seven days with him. They did care, but they didn’t know God. They cared, but they didn’t know God. They said a lot of amazingly spiritual things. Their vocabulary was finely tuned in the art of speaking religion. They said amazing things about God’s glory and His creation—powerful things that the average person could never even think of, let alone say from their heart. These guys weren’t just total fools, nor were they malicious. But they didn’t know God, and Job found out he didn’t either.

There is something that God is after beyond just not sinning and just serving Him, and that is to drive us to a deeper relationship with Him than could ever be imagined or ever be striven for. How does He go about that process? And that’s what I want to talk about for a few minutes here because it isn’t your normal stuff. You need to understand, I think, a little bit about the book of Job and what happened there and about the encounters that Paul had with death to the inner man. The kind of anguish that wanted him to despair even of life. You need to understand a little bit about those things because if you are going to have a fabulous relationship with God that goes beyond your superficial, “Bless me if I pray real hard, okay? Make everything okay in my life, and then I will trust you and love you, okay?” We’ve got to get past that superficial view of what Christianity is if we are going to be of any use to Him in the last of the last days. We’ve got to know Him the way Job came to know Him. Not the way Job knew Him, but the way Job came to know Him. We’ve got to know Him that way if we are going to be very useful to Him in the last of the last days. And that time’s coming upon us.

I’ve been hearing that my whole Christian life, “It’s just around the corner. Just watch and pretty soon a cloud will roll up and Jesus will jump out of it and that will be the end.” And I never believed that because there were too many things that just were not intact. I’m beginning to think that time is drawing more near, and it’s probably more because satan is tipping his hand than anything else. But I want all of us to be ready.

There’s a video many of us have seen. Some of us saw this guy teach about this in person in Richmond, Virginia. His name is Joshua. And he talked about the massive persecution that took place in China, and about how many of the church leaders, as well as the majority of the Christians in that day, the “upstanding Christian members” of their local churches, that the vast majority of them just packed it in. When the pressure was there, they caved in. They were persuaded to deny Jesus and they did it. So just like a house of cards, it just all fell down because the way they were building did not lend itself to being able to stand up in the storms.